Summoned Toward Wholeness

This week's guest post is by Michael Whitnah, director of college age ministry the Church of the Good Samaritan in partnership with the Coalition for Christian Outreach, an organization devoted to "transforming college students to transform the world." Michael and others from our church went last week to "Summoned toward Wholeness: A Conference on Food, Farming, and the Life of Faith," hosted by Duke Divinity School. I had hoped to attend, but couldn't. According to Michael, it was a valuable gathering of farmers, students, professors and pastors: "lots of thinkers and lot of do-ers." The fact that it sold out quickly, with much interest in next opportunities, is a hopeful sign of a deepening understanding of the Kingdom of God and it's implications for care of creation.

Michael agreed to share some reflections from the conference as part of this ongoing series. The following is based on his response to sessions by Ellen Davis, professor of Bible and practical theology at Duke and author of Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible, Joel Salatin, practitioner and advocate of  alternative farming at Polyface Farms in Virginia, and Norman Wirzba, professor of theology and ecology at Duke Divinity School and author and editor of numerous books on the intersection of faith and environmental stewardship. 

Creation care is fundamentally a moral, ethical, and theological issue, not a technological, economic, or scientific one. The prevailing cultural “wisdom” which suggests that we will be able to fix our current disastrous environmental state through growth, development, and research is anything but wise. Indeed, it’s the very definition of insanity (doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result), not wisdom.

The call to proper stewardship is first a call to repentance, a turning away from sin and toward reconciliation. We sit down for dinner and many of us still say grace, or give thanks, but in reality, confession should be paramount in our pre-meal prayers. Confession that we participate in industrial food systems; confession that we welcome ignorance; confession that it’s easy to write fiery blog posts on a computer made 8,000 miles away in miserable conditions by desperately poor workers. To be summoned toward wholeness is to first acknowledge that we are not whole. Christians call that not-wholeness “sin”. Sin is far more than a list of right and wrong—sin is the state of affairs we find ourselves in, the not-wholeness of ourselves, our relationships, every aspect of the world around us. It’s not supposed to be this way.

Repentance, as I mentioned before, is not simply a turning away from, but a turning towards. Turning towards wholeness, seeking after what the Israelites called shalom. I’ve found that it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the crises of creation, and that leads to hopelessness and paralysis. In the midst of that hopelessness, cultivating an agrarian mindset proves to be the best, perhaps the only, remedy.

Ellen Davis identifies three main tenets of agrarianism, all found in and deriving their authority from the Bible. (Regardless of varying opinions as to the authority of Judeo-Christian scripture, the wisdom found therein speaks to our context, especially if we hold the understanding that these issues are primarily moral and/or theological.) 

First, “The life of the land is inseparable from our own life; its health is inseparable from ours.” The language of Genesis, in which God creates humankind, points to a relationship between humans and humus, between people and fertile soil, adam from adammah in Hebrew. Soil is like kinfolk, or a relative. The Israelites, virtually all of whom were farmers, would have understood the interdependence profoundly, especially as the land they inhabited was an incredibly fragile ecological niche. Thin soil, severe drought interspersed with heavy rain, and steep mountains reinforced their precarious relationship with the land. Their survival depended on nurturing the soil…something we seem to have forgotten.

Second, land is invaluable. Davis notes that there is no record of arable land in Canaan being sold by Israelites in the Bible. Property in the city is sold, land is redeemed by relatives, and farm land is sold as part of debt-slavery, but no Hebrew puts land up for sale. Land ownership doesn’t exist—land itself is an inalienable gift from God to previous generations, and it’s your job to care for it for your children, grandchildren, and so on. Note well, the language of inalienable gift vs. inalienable right, a la the Enlightenment. As soon as you view the land as your right, no one can tell you what to do (or not do) to it, and it’s only purpose is to serve your own happiness. But a gift, a gift is something to be cherished, and often transcends material value.

Working with, not against the materiality
of the earth: Polyface Primer

The third component of agrarianism is what Davis calls “humble materiality.” In short, we need to take seriously the materiality of our existence. We are humans, made from matter (which God pronounces “good”), and just as land and humans are inseparable, so are our spiritual and material lives. At its heart, orthodox Christianity offers a stronger affirmation of the material world than any other worldview. (The incarnation and bodily resurrection of Christ are the two focal points of Christianity. Whether you believe that or not is tangential—Christianity is dependent on those two events, and thus offers a high view of bodies, and thus matter). This has tremendous implications for a Christian understanding of eschatology, but also significant implications for land-use. It’s acknowledging that we are not the masters of the universe, we don’t get to decide how everything works, but that in turn gives us the freedom to enjoy and participate in the materiality of the Earth.

When taken together, these three ideas form a robust understanding of agrarianism. Human flourishing and land flourishing are interdependent, land itself is an invaluable gift, and our identity as humans is essentially material. Turning towards this understanding turns us towards wholeness, and away from the exploitive and destructive mindset of industrialized consumerism. It’s a call to rediscover that our primary identity is inexorably bound up with the land—we are called to be stewards, to tend and care for the earth, to be gardeners. If not literally (for a city can live symbiotically with its surrounding countryside), than with an awareness of the means of life; an agrarian awareness that permeates our decisions and actions.

For more from these speakers:

Ellen Davis, Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible

Joel Salatin: Folks, This Ain't Normal

Norman Wirzba, Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating

Norman Wirzba and Fred Bahnson, Making Peace with the Land: God's Call to Reconcile with Creation

Norman Wirzba, ed. The Essential Agrarian Reader: The Future of Culture, Community and the Land

A bonus: A televised portrait of Wendell Berry was posted online this morning, with discussion of Berry's landmark work "The Unsettling of America," and what it means to advocate for stewardship of land, farming, and sustainable food systems. If our primary identity is inexorably bound up with the land, as Michael so eloquently expressed it above, how do we express that in practical, political, and personal ways? Wendell Berry offers a challenging example of faithfulness in this arena: 

"We don't have a right to ask whether we're going to succeed or not. The only question we have a right to ask is 'what's the right thing to do? What does this earth require of us if we want to continue to live on it?'" 

This post is part of an ongoing series on God's Green Equity.

• God's Green Equity: August 4, 2013
• Seed Parables: August 11, 2013 
• Miracle Seeds of Sorrow's Kingdom: August 25, 2013   
• How Much  Does Justice Cost? September 1, 2013
• Taxonomy of Ignorance and the Unknown Unknowns: September 8,2013
• For God so Loved the Earth, September 15, 2013
• Reflections and Refractions on the Anacotia River, Sept. 22, 2013
• Imagining Wholeness, Sept. 29, 2013

 Earlier posts on the same topic:

• Green Grace: May 15, 2011 
• Earth Day Shalom: April 22, 2012
• Hungering Far Past Rightness: March 3, 2013

As always, your thoughts, comments, questions are welcome.  

Imagining Wholeness

I had hoped to go this weekend to a conference in North Carolina called “Summoned toward Wholeness: A Conference on Food, Farming, and the Life of Faith,” with speakers Ellen F. Davis, Joel Salatin, Scott Cairns, and Norman Wirzba.

But life happens, and that trip didn’t. So I’ve asked a friend who’s attending to post here next week with his own highlights and reflections.

In the meantime, I spend my days trying to imagine wholeness.

Have you ever seen a gardener, standing still at the edge of a garden, eyes slightly closed, head slightly tilted, just looking, listening, not moving at all?

It’s that moment of imaging: seeing what’s there, picturing what’s not. Wondering how to get there.

My back yard is the test plot on this: manageably small (exactly half an acre), wonderfully quiet. At the moment, lush and green. I wander through my stepping stone path, linger on my mossy trail, enjoying what’s there, imaging the next step toward the vision in my mind.

When we moved here 16 years ago, the squirrels ran around the edge of the yard on the old rail fence rather than walk through the toxic grass. The previous owners had been so intent on growing lawn in places it didn’t want to grow, they had doused the ground with chemicals. It took years to get the birds to move back in.

But I’ve imagined a place where birds would want to live, and here they are: house wrens, chipping sparrows, nuthatch, chickadees. This summer a flicker family drilled a hole in a locust. A pair of downies flits back and forth from suet to trees, and back again. An archway path festooned with honeysuckle has brought hummingbirds, regularly, whirring near my head.

Even so the world intrudes. A natural gas pipeline through the center of the yard reminds me: I live in Pennsylvania, tied to a grid that leads in every direction. That line ties to a larger line. In one direction are the fracking wells of shale country, not far away. In the other, refineries, gray fog rising over them most hours of the day. My imagination knows they’re there. But wholeness? I can’t quite see it.

A larger canvas for my imagination: a place called Exton Park. I’ve mentioned it before, 800 acres of degraded suburban land, some still farmed, some damaged by deer browse. Some brimming full of invasive shrubs, trees, vines. And yet, despite the damage, it holds a small pond where egrets and heron take refuge, acres of wetland where just yesterday we heard a sora calling. Open skies where osprey, kestrel and harrier soar. Amazing wildflowers: asters, goldenrod, New York ironweed.

Last Saturday I took part in Make a Difference Day: a morning of work grubbing vines and roots from the side of a berm, then helping organize volunteers to plant native grasses, reeds and forbs. It was my kind of morning: teen boys from nearby Church Farm School, some new acquaintances who bird the pond like I do, a few plant folks eager to see what plants we had in store, some families with young kids happy to scoop water and pour it wherever I pointed.

By the next morning I had poison ivy on both arms, and my face was starting to puff. Apparently, I’m part of the 30 to 35% of the population that’s “highly sensitive” to our industrious native vine. So I spent the morning in a nearby Minute Clinic, and I’ve spent the week itching, fighting the side-effects of prednisone, and reminding myself how much I love envisioning Exton Park as a place made whole, a beautiful, reclaimed landscape. Even when it costs me.

But the call to imagine goes far beyond my yard or local park.

For the last year and a half I’ve been involved in promoting and taking part in a national study on food and farming. I opened my mouth at a League of Women Voter’s planning meeting, and found myself leading a committee, then a caucus at a national convention, now serving on a national committee that sends me reeling down rabbit holes to ferret out information about corn subsidies, neonicotinoids , pesticide overload, industry-driven public policy.

This past week I had two deadlines: a third draft on genetic engineering, a first draft on factory farming. Do you want to know what’s in animal feed? The financial pressures forcing small farms off the planet? The abuse of workers, farmers, animals, water, land that are part of our quest for ever cheaper, more convenient food?

Ah. Maybe not.

I don’t want to know either.

Yet, knowing is the first step toward grieving.

And grieving, according to Walter Brueggemann, Old Testament scholar and student of the prophets, is the first step toward imagining the new.

As my son wrote in a guet post last week, this world around us is a reflection of who we are, the choices we’ve made. The values we’ve held dear.

What I see gives me pause, and leads me toward repentence.

So I dig deeper into the studies, the reports. The testimony of small farmers to the Department of Justice, about coercive contracts, disappearing markets, tightening consolidation. The carefully worded scientific conclusions about what happens to bees, soil, rats, hogs, people, when we play with things we don’t quite understand.

And I grieve.

Yesterday I walked into a local food store – a place I go often – and found myself staring at the shelves and shelves of food. Mostly bad food. Full of corn syrup, carrageenan, other things I no longer want to eat. Over-processed, over-packaged, dusty boxes. To me, they looked like death.

So I grieve. Repent of my own collusion in fast, cheap, easy imitation food.

And imagine wholeness.

Here’s what it looks like, to me, today:

A farm not far from here. SpringWood Farm. In Kinzer, PA. It belongs to Roman Stoltzfoos and his family. I heard him speak at a conference last winter about his cows and the experiment his sons and he are running: trying to find out which grains to sprout in his high hoop tunnels as a source of winter fodder for his organic pastured cows.

SpringWood solar chicken house

He showed some slides of the hoop tunnels, the sprouting grains, the cows.

The beautiful, green, inviting pasture.

He showed slides of his chickens and their chicken tractors: little hoop houses on wheels he moves from field to field.

It wasn’t that long ago – forty years? maybe fify? – that almost all our food came from lovely places like SpringWood Farm.

Real food – brightly colored peppers, iron-rich dark greens, eggs with yolks so yellow they looked like melted gold.

I came home from that conference last winter with my head spinning. I’d heard a discussion about “complex, chronic environmental exposures,” and the invisible nanomaterials already in our food supply.

I’d sat through sessions about new food safety regulations – and how they cater to the industry model, burden the small scale farmer, and leave our food no safer.

And I wondered: how far away is SpringWood Farm?

One of my daughters had been challenging me to join a local CSA – a Community Supported Agriculture program. The one she had in mind: Wimer’s Organics. A Lancaster farm that delivers in our county.

I checked, and found they also deliver eggs: farm fresh eggs. From SpringWood Farm.

So, yes, we joined Wilmer’s Organics CSA.

And ordered a weekly dozen eggs.

Every week I show up to a porch in the next town over, leave last week’s empty box, pick up this week’s box of lovely color. And my carton of beautiful eggs from SpringWood Farm.

Does it cost more?

Yes. It does.

More than a big Mac. Or a box of mac and cheese.

More than a Coke. Or an order of fries.

But every penny goes to the farmer, supporting his vision of a healthy, wholesome food supply.

Unlike the dollars I spend at the store down the street, where only pennies on the dollar go to a farmer, pennies go to underpaid farm workers, and the larger share goes to advertising, packaging, transportation, and the corporate powers that propel us toward an ever-more abusive global food system.

I’m still learning what I can about how to advocate for wholeness. How to stand up for local farmers, how to speak back to the ideathat industrial farming is inevitable, the only way to feed a hungry world.

In the meantime, I’m pulling weeds, planting reeds, sauteing and grilling vegetables I still can’t name.

And imaging a world where beauty, health, wisdom, wholeness are more than ideas we see with our eyes closed, but part of the daily fabric of our lives.

This post is part of an ongoing series on God's Green Equity.

·                     God's Green Equity: August 4, 2013

·                     Seed Parables: August 11, 2013 

·                     Miracle Seeds of Sorrow's Kingdom: August 25, 2013   

·                     How Much  Does Justice Cost? September 1, 2013

·                     Taxonomy of Ignorance and the Unknown Unknowns: September 8,2013

·                     For God so Loved the Earth, September 15, 2013

·                     Reflections and Refractions on the Anacotia River, Sept. 22, 2013

 Earlier posts on the same topic:

·                     Green Grace: May 15, 2011 

·                     Earth Day Shalom: April 22, 2012

·                     Hungering Far Past Rightness: March 3, 2013

As always, your thoughts, comments, questions are welcome.  

How Much Does Justice Cost?

Let justice roll down like waters
And righteousness like a mighty stream.

Martin Luther King quoted Amos 5:24 in his "I Have a Dream" speech, commemorated this past week on the 50th anniversary of the nistoric 1963 March on Washington, but he also quoted that passage in a speech during the Montgomery bus boycott, in his letter from Birmingham jail, in "How Should a Christian View Communism?", "On Vietnam," "Where Do We Go from Here?", "Our God is Marching On."

He quoted it again the night before he was assassinated, speaking in Memphis, Tennessee, in support of striking sanitation workers. Justice, to him, was rooted in scripture, and tied tightly to the just treatment of the poor, and of low-income workers here and around the world.

The book of Amos would be a good text to read on this Labor Day Sunday. Just nine chapters long, it provides a striking view of a period of expansive trade, growing division between rich and poor, oblivious consumption, disregard for the needs of workers.

Amos himself was a sheep herder and fig farmer. Like farmers today, he saw the way wealth and power concentrated into the hands of the few, while those who worked to create the wealth fell deeper into poverty. He also saw what happened when production of food gave way to production of profit.

Hear this, you who trample the needy
And do away with the poor of the land,
Saying
When will the New Moon be over that we may sell grain,
And the Sabbath be ended that we may market wheat?”
Skimping the measure,
Boosting the price
And cheating with dishonest scales,
Buying the poor with silver
And the needy for a pair of sandles,
Selling even the sweepings with the wheat.
 (Amos 8:4-6)

Spend even a little time looking at labor practices in today’s agricultural systems and Amos’ words jump to life.

How many workers are forced to labor far past a reasonable work week, for little pay, or worse, as bonded laborers?

I’ve posted before about slave labor and chocolate, but the practice of child slave labor reaches far past that one food product.

Coffee is the second most traded commodity world-wide after oil, and much of the world’s coffee is harvested by forced labor, often by children, some as young as five years old. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, child labor is part of coffee production in Colombia, Côte D’Ivoire, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Guinea, Honduras, El Salvador, Kenya, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, and Uganda.

When global coffee buyers push prices lower, small growers find themselves looking for ways to cut their costs, and forced child labor is a common strategy.

“In the past decade, the proportion of value added to coffee in the industrialized world has increased significantly. The share of producing countries’ earnings in the retail market decreased drastically by the early 2000s, to between 6% and 8% of the value of a coffee packet sold in a supermarket” (UNCTAD 2004). One of the root causes of forced and child labor in coffee is the low prices and lack of price stability for farmers.”

Amos, in his indictment of wealthy consumers, is rarely polite:

“Hear this word, you cows of Bashan on Mount Samaria,
You women who oppress the poor and crush the needy
And say to your husbands, “bring us some drinks!”  (4:1)

Surely the women of Bashan knew little of the conditions of the poor supplying those drinks, just as we know little of the conditions of the poor growing and harvesting our coffee.

Apparently, for Amos at least, that was no excuse.

But what would it cost us to ensure a living wage?

“Farmers who participate in the Fair Trade program receive, as of 2012, a $0.20/lb premium on Fair Trade Coffee (Fair Trade USA). In return for this premium price, Fair Trade cooperatives adhere to a number of labor standards, including the prohibition of forced and child labor.” (Verité Fair Labor Worldwide)

Simple math: insistence on Fair Trade coffee should cost just 20 cents more per pound. Although, looking at the grocery shelf, the premium may be a little higher. And maybe a few minutes extra to look for the Fair Trade certification.  

But coffee and chocolate, grown in developing countries, are not the only food products where unfair labor practices abound.

Look closer to home: the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, begun in 1993 in Florida, has been working to raise awareness of bonded labor and unjust practices throughout the southeastern states, primarily in the harvesting of tomatoes. Their antislavery campaign has helped gain freedom for over 1200 workers held against their will in Florida. Kidnapped or tricked into captivity, many of them were locked at night in box trucks or sheds, sometimes chained, beaten if they tried to escape.

For thirty years, the wages of tomato workers held constant: 50 cents a bucket.  Buckets hold about 32 pounds, and until recently, workers were forced to pile the buckets high. The best the fastest pickers could earn was $75 a day.

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers has been promoting a Fair Food Campaign, attempting to raise tomato workers wages by one penny a pound, and instituting rules about fair measures, fair hours, and other worker protections.

Some corporations have signed on in support of the campaign.  Others refuse to pay the penny a pound difference. This summer, the CIW is asking help in convincing Giant, Stop and Shop, Kroger and Wendy’s that a penny a pound isn’t too much to ask in support of justice for workers.

A penny a pound.

Surely we can afford it?

But this issue of justice goes deeper still.

Not long ago I heard Wenonah Hauter, director of Food and Water Watch, speak about her new book Foodopoly. Concentration in the food industry puts pressure on small and midsize farmers, forcing many to sign contracts that increase their debt and decrease their profits, dictate conditions, narrow choice.

Just four companies (Kelloggs, ConAgras, Kraft and General Mills) control 80 percent of the cereal industry. Four companies control 83 percent of the beef packing industry, 85 percent of soybean processing, 66 percent of pork.  As of 2008, three companies (Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, and Bunge) controlled 90 percent of the global grain trade.

More than 60 percent of all poultry in the U.S. is now raised by growers locked into one-sided contracts that force the famers to take on risk and capital investment while leaving the distributors (Pilgrim’s Pride, Tyson, Purdue, Sanderson Farms) free to dictate terms, walk away from contracts at will, and dodge liability for pollution or disease. The farmer’s share of the price of chicken has been stuck at under 5 cents a pound for the last twenty-five years, while the distributors’ profits soar into the millions.

If growers in the U.S. are pressured and squeezed, forced into contracts that leave little room to move, how much greater is the pressure on small farmers in other parts of the world? How much greater the incentive to underpay workers, fall back on slave labor, ignore safety precautions, “sell the sweepings with the wheat”?

We live in a complicated world.

And we love easy.

But sometimes the cost of easy is too great.

Amos warned of the dangers of commodification, treating all of life as something for sale: land, time, justice, even people:

They sell the righeous for silver,
And the needy for a pair of sandals.
They tramploe on the heads of the poor
As upon the dust of the ground
And deny justice to the oppressed
(2:6-7)

He warned against worship of the idol of profit and the resultant disregard for compassion, mercy, wisdom, justice:

you have turned justice into poisonand the fruit of righteousness into bitterness (6:12)

Mistreatment of farmers and farm workers goes hand in hand with mistreatment of animals, of soil, of water. If the profit motive is the greatest good, then human health, environmental health, health of rural communities all become expendable.

What would it take to change this? What would it take to bring justice for farmers and farm workers, and along with that, better treatment of land, animals, human health?

Prayer.

Knowledge.

Pennies on the dollar.

Expenditure of time.

Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation, asked:

“What single thing could change the U.S. food system, practically overnight? Widespread public awareness – of how this system operates and whom it benefits, how it harms consumers, how it mistreats animals and pollutes the land, how it corrupts public officials and intimidates the press, and most of all, how its power ultimately depends on a series of cheerful and ingenious lies.”

It’s time we understood, and spoke against, those “cheerful and ingenious lies.”

Here are some places to start:

Buy Fair Trade

Support the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’Fair Food Campaign: Take Action 

Support US farmers: Buy Fresh, Buy Local, Farm and Ranch Freedom

Learn more about food and justice: Harvesting Justice (a downloadable book about global food issues)

This is the third in a series on food and farming, Jesus' nature parables, and the intermingling of justice, sabbath, shalom, and the sweet, shared hope of God's green equity:

God's Green Equity: August 4, 2013

Seed Parables: August 11, 2013 

Miracle Seeds of Sorrow's Kingdom: August 25, 2013   

“Miracle” Seeds of Sorrow’s Kingdom

Who invented seeds?

Certainly no human mind.

Every seed is a tiny parcel of DNA, complete with initial energy source, protective packaging, encoded plan for growth.

I helped a friend and her kids plant their first garden this year: clearing stones and weeds, loosening the soil, reading instructions on depth and spacing, planting peas, beans, lettuce. It was fun to share their excitement at the first green shoots leaping up, savoring the miracle and mystery of seed: we plant, water, wait. As Wendell Berry says in a lovely short poem: 

“The seed is in the ground.
Now may we rest in hope
While darkness does its work. 

For most of human history, humans have played at the edges of this mystery: looking for the sweetest fruit, the sturdiest vine, then saving seed to try again the next season.

In the mid nineteenth century, an Augustinian monk from Silesia, Gregor Mendel, spent years observing peas, painting pollen back and forth from green peas to yellow, studying traits, wondering. He’s considered the grandfather of hybridization, the first to find a way to selectively cross-pollinate in pursuit of specific traits.

Andean Potatoes, Marcello Marengo,
Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity

But he wasn’t the first to selectively breed plants or animals with valuable traits. The earth is full of plants and creatures bred to suit specific places and tasks. Persian Greyhounds and New Guinea Singing Dogs have been bred for thousands of years, as have Arabian horses, Icelandic sheep, Dorking chickens, Ibérico pigs.

Indigenous growers in the Andes mountains created over a thousand varieties of potatoes, each suited to an optimum altitude and microclimate. Sri Lanka at one time was said to have two thousand varieties of rice, adapted to different elevations, soils, varying water conditions. A search for heritage apples in the US has so far yielded 950 varieties – bred by farmers, orchardists, , families. Historians say a century ago there were 16,000 named varieties: Albany Beauty, Allen’s Everlasting, Arkansas Black, Smokehouse, Sops in Wine. They were bred for specific growing conditions, specific purposes, or for the beauty of their skin, the color of their stripes, an unexpected flavor perfect for pie, applesauce, or snacking a brisk fall day.

But somewhere along the way, the bounty of natural hybridization was deemed not enough, and technology took over. In the years following World War II, Norman Borlaug, a plant pathologist and agronomist, turned to something called “mutation breeding” – the use of radiation or chemicals to force mutations in a population of seeds. The resultant plants were examined for traits that would expand yield and reduce susceptibility to wheat rust. The resultant high-yield disease-resistant dwarf wheat dramatically increased wheat yield in countries like Mexico and India, so much so that Borlaug was given the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970; the selection committee said of him: “More than any other single person of this age, he has helped provide bread for a hungry world. We have made this choice in the hope that providing bread will also give the world peace.” 

Borlaug’s wheat seeds were called “miracle seeds,” and the changes in farming practices promoted along with his seed spurred what has been called “the Green Revolution.”

Advocates of industrial agriculture still sing the praises of Borlaug and the Green Revolution, with supporting statistics: increases in productivity, acres planted in Borlaug’s hybrid wheat and subsequent high yield rice.

Other voices are not so congratulatory. The statistics also document the billions of pounds of pesticide and nitrogen dumped on fields, the acres of bio-diverse food systems plowed under.

And questions have been raised about ways of measuring yield. If an acre of land once supported maize, millet, peas, beans, squash, oil seeds, sorghum, and interplanted herbs, is an increase in one of those crops a benefit if all the rest are lost? 

Spraying Pesticide in India, Mark Edwards, Still Pictures

And then there’s the subtext of profit and expense. The Green Revolution promoted ever higher expense in inputs: tractors, chemicals, expensive seed. Global companies profited. Small farmers went deeper into debt.

It all comes back to seed.

Borlaug’s experiments with chemical and radioactive mutagenesis gave way to genetic modification: removing genes from one species to insert into another. In one version of this, genetic strands from an agricultural virus (Cauliflower Mosaic Virus) are inserted into genetic sequences of various crops (corn, soy, sugar beets, cotton, canola) to create disease resistant varieties.

Another common genetic modification uses gene coding from glyphosate-resistant enzymes obtained from a plant pathogen (Agrobacterium tumefaciens), creating crops that can be sprayed with weed-killing herbicides without harm to the crop itself. Another modification makes use of genetic material from a soil bacterium toxic to insects and root worms, creating plants that are resistant to insect and rootworm predation.

While billions have been spent creating and marketing these seeds, very little has been spent investigating their long-term impacts on human and environmental health.  Market introduction follows a voluntaryconsultation between seed-designers and regulatory agencies, with applicants providing results from their own 90 day investigation to a panel often composed of industry consultants.  Independent research is often stifled.

Growing coalitions of doctors, scientists, and farmers have asked for better regulation of these “miracle” seeds and more extensive research regarding their impact on both environment and human-health.

Monoculture Pesticides,The Permaculture Research Institute

But even if the miracle seeds of high-yield wheat, Round-up Ready corn, virus-resistant soy are perfectly safe, the context of their growth is without doubt harmful. These miracle seeds were made to be grown in monocultures dependent on petrochemical intervention: huge fields of depleted soil drenched in nitrogen fertilizers, sprayed with herbicides, toxic to pollinators, song-birds, farmers.

The pesticides inserted in the miracle seeds’ DNA, or used to coat the seed itself, or sprayed across the growing plants, linger in thesoil, run off in our water, aggregate in the animals fed pesticide-laden feed, cross through placentas to the blood of unborn babies. 

Last winter I heard a speaker from the National Institute of Environmental Health Services share his agency’s concern about “chronic, complex exposures.” Safety tests for pesticides and genetically modified crops are rarely longer than ninety days, and test only one new substance at a time. What happens, he asked quietly, when we eat those substances day after day, for years at a time? What happens when they mix in ways we can’t predict? He showed a series of charts documenting illnesses that have increased exponentially in the last twenty years, charts that mirror the exponential rise in pesticide use, and the spread of genetically modified seed.

These miracle seeds have become for me both sign and symbol of an industrial model that believes more is always better, technology holds the cure, and any problems caused by human interference can be solved with ever more interference.

Around the globe, consumers and farmers are asking that genetically modified foods be labeled, that patents on seed be banned, that huge seed monopolies be slowed in their relentless quest to swallow smaller seed suppliers. 

What happens when the source of food is gathered into ever tighter corporate control?

And what responsibility rests with me, in this global dialogue about seed, health, profit?

No one invented seed.
The word sings out in every tongue:
Samen, semente, sēklas, siol.
The gift of life itself is passed
From hand to hand, sacco to sac,
Promise of harvests yet to come.

No one invented seed.
God’s own earth-magic, ancient miracle,
Hope wrapped in fibers paper thin,
In small round pellets, green, or brown,
In precious flecks, in salt-sized dots,
In shells, in pods, in kernels, grains.

No one invented seed,
Yet countless farmers, peasants, monks
In gardens, fields around the globe,
Waited for the greener pea,
The sweeter corn, the stronger vine.
Saved seed, then handed on the fruit.

No one invented seed,
Yet someone, seeing green in green,
Pushed patents, lawyers,
Drove from field to field,
Grabbing up time-tested treasure,
Narrowing the flow of seed into one strong hand.

“No one invented seed!”
Cry cotton farmers, in their dying fields,
Cry Haitian peasants, on their rubbled hills.
Cry campesinos: “No Monsanto maize!”

Around the globe, small growers stand to say:
“No to your GMOs, your patents and your seed!
No to your theft of ancient wisdom.
No to your Roundup and your greed.”
As millions march, they chant this truth:
“Seeds are life!
No one invented seed.”
  (C. Kuniholm, 2012)    

Who Owns the Seed? Seed Freedom

This is the third in a series on food and farming, Jesus' nature parables, and the intermingling of justice, sabbath, shalom, and the sweet, shared hope of God's green equity:

God's Green Equity: August 4, 2013
Seed Parables: August 11, 2013            

God’s Green Equity

Swamp White Oak at Exton Park

Say among the nations, “The Lord reigns.”

    The world is firmly established, it cannot be moved;
    he will judge the peoples with equity.

Let the heavens rejoice, let the earth be glad;
    let the sea resound, and all that is in it.
Let the fields be jubilant, and everything in them;
    let all the trees of the forest sing for joy.         (Psalm 96:10-13)

This summer I’ve found myself involved in some new projects that have me thinking more than ever about the physical world around us, how we use and abuse its resources, and what it means to be stewards of what we’ve been given.

And I’ve been digging deeper into that strange stew of words that swim through scripture: justice, equity, righteousness, faithfulness, shalom.

I’m involved in a League of Women Voters national committee studying the state of food and farming: confined animal feeding operations, subsidies for ever expanding monocultures of corn, transgenic salmon, nanotechnology in food, health impacts of pesticide exposure.

As part of my involvement in the League, I attended a convention in Lewisburg, PA, and a council meeting in Leesburg, VA, where I found myself talking to a wide mix of women concerned about food, farms, and environmental impacts: a beekeeper from Illinois, worrying about bee colony collapse; a daughter of generations of shrimpers from Louisiana, grieving the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico; a professor of energy policy from Nebraska who explained quietly over a leisurely dinner that natural gas drilling has turned the expansive grazing lands of native grasses into industrial landscape. I carry her voice with me as she said, very softly: “The Wind River Valley now has the worst air quality in the country.”

Yes, and I carry the voice of the woman from rural Erie County, who explained that abandoned oil wells not far from her home are being used as repositories for contaminated natural gas waste water – too near Lake Erie, and too near the small family farms that supply the few jobs of the region. “We finally got the lake clean, and now this. And what happens to those farms when they can’t get clean water?”

My other involvement this summer is with Friends of Exton Park, a group I’ve helped start to promote and protect an 800 acre park in the middle of our county, a pond, wetlands, and surrounding fields and woodlands, a green jewel in the middle of the suburban sprawl of shopping malls, highways, and developments.

In the park, we’ve been removing invasive plants that threaten the native habitat: cutting back oriental honeysuckle bush, freeing native trees from the stranglehold of oriental bittersweet, balling up miles of mile-a-minute vine, digging up purple loosestrife before it fills in chokes the fragile wetlands

In both arenas, I’ve encountered people surprised to find a Christian concerned about such things.

Here’s what I’ve been told: 

Christians don’t care about climate change or global warming.

Christians believe the earth is here for us to plunder.

“Green,” to Christians, is pagan. Or pantheistic. Or both.

And God will destroy this earth, the sooner the better, so why bother? 

Let me take a moment to grieve.

I wonder, sometimes, how God feels when his people misrepresent him so badly.

Yes, there are loud voices that insist emphatically that climate change is a propaganda tool of godless liberals.

Voices that equate unfettered consumption with patriotism and righteousness.

But surely there are other voices?

Several years ago, Byron Borger of Hearts and Minds bookstore posted “ Learning to love what God loves: Creation care and Christian discipleship”. He described almost four dozen books on what he described as “green theology--a strong emphasis of the doctrine of creation (what Calvin called "the theatre of God.")”

Just a sampling:

• All Creation Sings: The Voice of God in Nature, J. Ellsworth Kalas
• Wild Thoughts from Wild Places, David Quammen 
• Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough, New Planet,  Bill McKibben 
• Living Beyond the "End of the World": ASpirituality of Hope, Margaret Swedish 
• Green Revolution: Coming Together to Care for Creation, Ben Lowe 
• Tending to Eden:Environmental Stewardship for God's People, Scott Sabin
• Christianity, Climate Change and Sustainable Living, Nick Spencer, Robert White & Virginia Vroblesky
• Walking Gently on the Earth: Making Faithful Choices AboutFood, Energy, Shelter and More, Lisa Graham McMinn & Megan Anna Neff 

Reflecting on the many strong titles about love and care of creation, Borger wrote: 

“It breaks my heart to know that so few of these kinds of resources are well-known, most not on the shelves of church libraries or resource centers, not selling well at most Christian bookstores. Some fine green titles quickly go out of print since customers do not buy them from the stores, or the stores don't by them from the publishers.  (Some stores refuse to stock them, even, which is another sad story.)”   

I’ve been spending time in a series of psalms: 96 to 98. Parts of them are familiar: “Sing to the Lord a new song.” “Shout for joy to the Lord all the earth.”

But there’s something going on in these psalms I hadn’t noticed: the joy and celebration rest in confidence that God will return to act on behalf of the suffering earth. 

“Let the fields be jubilant, and everything in them.
Then all the trees of the forest will sing for joy;
They will sing before the Lord, for he comes,
He comes to judge the earth.
He will judge the world in righteousness
And all the peoples in his truth.”
       (Psalm 96:12-13) 

These psalms and other parts of scripture make clear: the earth is part of God’s plan of redemption, and his justice will be occasion of joy for nature itself: fields, trees, seas, mountains.

Which suggests that those who want to understand the joy and hope of God’s justice might need to engage in some way with this earth we call home: its struggle, its pain, its beauty.

In Engaging God’s World, theologian Cornelius Plantinga says:

“Biblical hope has a wide-angle lens. It takes in whole nations and peoples. It brings into focus the entire created order—wolves and lambs, mountains and plains, rivers and valleys. When it is widest and longest, biblical hope looks forward toward a whole “new heaven and new earth” in which death, and mourning, and pain will have passed away.” (13)

I’ll be spending the rest of the summer looking for ways to engage more volunteers in caring for Exton Park.

Experimenting with best practices of phragmites control in wetlands.

And wrestling with my own expansive crop of smartweed and creeping charlie.

Spending as much time outside as I can, bird-watching, kayaking, traveling to the Adirondacks to spend time with extended family in my favorite New York wilderness.

And finishing my part of our national study, trying to understand how federal policy shaped our current food supply and what needs to change to support more sustainable farming.

I’ll be exploring some of the voices listed by Byron Borger, and looking for other voices as well that affirm “green theology.”

And I’ll be blogging about food and farming, Jesus’ nature parables, and the intermingling of justice, sabbath, shalom, and the sweet, shared hope of God’s green equity. 

Let the sea resound, and everything in it,
    the world, and all who live in it.Let the rivers clap their hands,
    let the mountains sing together for joy;
  let them sing before the Lord,
    for he comes to judge the earth.
He will judge the world in righteousness
    and the peoples with equity.
           (Psalm 98)

Whose Seed? Whose Food?

In January, seed catalogues start arriving in my mailbox: Burpees, Gurney’s, Stark Bros, others. I like to page through, thinking about what I might plant, marveling at the varieties of tomatoes, squash, peppers.

This year, though, my thoughts have been turning in a different direction. Last weekend I helped a local group host a screening of The Corporation, a sobering film about the role of multinational corporations and their impact on food supply, energy policy, rights of workers, and a wide range of other important topics.

One segment of the movie describes global agribusiness Monsanto’s sale of Bt cotton to illiterate, traditional farmers in India. In 1998, the World Bank forced India to open its seed sector to multinational corporations like Monsanto. Monsanto promised that its patented, genetically modified cotton would yield huge increases in returns and allow a decrease in the amount of pesticide used. Farmers were provided loans to shift to the new seed. They quickly discovered that Bt cotton required far more pesticide than previous varieties, needed twice as much water as traditional cotton, and that they would be prosecuted if they tried to save seed to plant the following year. The harvest yields were not large enough to cover the increased costs. In fact, most farmers found their yields were smaller.

Farmers who believed Monsanto promotions found themselves deep in debt, without seed for the new year ahead and without funds to buy more seed. For Indian cotton farmers, the margin was always slim, with seed, crop, and climate held in fragile balance. Since the introduction of Monsanto’s seeds, that balance has disappeared. More than 200,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide under the weight of crushing debt. In 2010, the Indian National Crime Records Bureau estimated that 46 farmers were killing themselves each day – one suicide every 30 minutes.

Monsanto’s disruption of traditional farming methods, in India and countries around the globe, goes far beyond false advertising and terminator seeds (seeds genetically altered so that the next generation of seed is sterile). While buying up seed companies large and small, Monsanto has also been applying for patents of traditionally grown crops that have been selected over centuries for disease or pest resistance. At the same time, company enforcers have been suing farmers, in the US and other countries, whose farms show signs of pollination from Monsanto patented plants. Since pollen can be carried by bees, or travel on the wind, and since seed itself can drift, Monsanto patented variants can show up in neighboring fields. Hundreds of farmers have lost to Monsanto in court, with hundreds more settling out of court rather than face bankruptcy in the face of legal fees. As the company patents seed traditionally passed on from farmer to farmer, farmers around the world can now be sued for growing the same plants they’ve grown for years.

For over half a century,  Monsanto has been working to control markets, and has been marketing products with false promises. Monsanto produced and marketed Agent Orange –the herbicide used during the Vietnam War. While Monsanto said it was non-toxic and could be sprayed safely to deforest large tracts of jungle growth, the chemical killed and maimed hundreds of thousands and caused an epidemic of miscarriages, stillbirths, and horrifying birth defects among the people of Vietnam.

Monsanto was also responsible for marketing and manufacturing DDT, promising the chemical was completely harmless to humans and other creatures. DDT was eventually banned in the US, but not before the bald eagle and osprey were almost extinct.

Roundup is another popular Monsanto product, the most widely used herbicide in the United States.  About 100 million pounds are applied to U.S. farms and lawns every year. According to Monsanto, Roundup is bio-degradeable, non-toxic, and completely safe for birds and animals. According to independent researchers in a variety of countries, Roundup’s combination of ingredients can cause cancer, tumors, and birth defects. 

Another Monsanto invention –recombinant bovine growth hormone – rGBH (also called rBST, or Prosilic), is marketed to dairy farmers to increase milk production. The testing period in the US was only ninety days. According to Monsanto, “there’s nothing to worry about.” When a team of investigative reporters found that there were, in fact, health implications to consider, Monsanto bullied Fox News into killing that report. Canada, Europe, Japan, New Zealand, Australia and other countries have banned rGBH. In the US, Monsanto fought consumer requests to have rGBH milk labeled, even pushing laws banning organic dairy farmers from advertising or labeling “no rGBH” milk.

Monsanto has a reputation for saying “this is harmless,” without doing the necessary research to be sure that’s true. Untested Monsanto products have left a wide swath of misery in countries around the world.

Which brings me back to my seed catalogs. As Monsanto buys up smaller seed companies and introduces unlabeled genetically modified seed, how do I know what I’m growing? The Monsanto seed monopoly is hard to track, but food activists believe the company now controls 97% of the world’s maize market, and 95% of the global cottonseed supply. Seed prices are skyrocketing, as Monsanto exercises control over the supply.

Trying to sort out the implications of the Monsanto seed monopolies and the introduction of GMOs (genetically modified organisms), here’s what I’ve discovered:  

  

• Genetically engineered foods can contain genes derived from bacteria, viruses, insects, fish, animals, or unrelated, sometimes toxic, plants.
• 93 percent of US soy, cotton, and canola seed planted in the US in 2010 was genetically engineered.
• 86 percent of field corn and, according to Monsanto, half of the sweet corn planted in the US this past season was genetically modified.
• 70 to 80 percent of processed foods on supermarket shelves–from soda to soup, crackers to condiments–contain genetically engineered ingredients.
• Any American meat not labeled “certified organic” or “non-GMO” carries traces of GMOs, since corn and soy are the primary feed grains.
• Some strawberries, citrus, bananas and papayas, tomatoes, potatoes, sweet peppers, yellow squash, and zucchini are genetically modified. They aren't labeled. 
• “Natural” foods are not regulated. They usually contain less, or no, artificial flavors, colors or sweeteners, but can contain GMOs. 

I’ve been wondering, for years now, why there are so many mystery illnesses that didn’t seem to exist when I was younger, or which occurred with much less frequency: autism, Alzheimer’s, asthma, food allergies of every kind, chronic fatigue, persistent acne, unexplained digestive disorders. Biologists and physicians around the globe are tying these to the untested, undisclosed additives and alterations in our food.

GMOs have been flooding the market in the US for the past fifteen years and the upswing in most of these ailments, along with increases in some kinds of cancers and tumors, tracks almost exactly with the increase in GMOs. As a result of proliferating health concerns, and ongoing research, almost fifty countries now insist that any genetically modified food be labeled; some nations ban all GMOs, including honey from bees in countries like ours where GMOs are permitted.

“Nonsense,” says Monsanto. “Nothing to worry about.”

At what point does this become my concern? Should I care about what happens to cotton farmers in India? Rice farmers in China? Corn farmers in Haiti?

Should I sign on in support of organic farmers here in the US, facing Monsanto in court this week in the opening hearing of a lawsuit, Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association (OSGATA) et al v. Monsanto, challenging Monsanto’s abusive seed patenting practices and struggling to keep the organic food movement alive?

Should I join the many health and food democracy groups begging the FDA to require that GMOs be labeled, so those afflicted with mystery illnesses can shop with greater confidence and protect themselves from the harm of altered foods??

In 2 Corinthians, Paul urged the Corinthian Christians to express their support of their struggling brothers and sisters in Macedonia. He reminded them that as they reached out with generosity and concern: “he who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food will also supply and increase your store of seed and will enlarge the harvest of your righteousness.”

In all the talk about seeds, GMOs, farmers, I find myself thinking about the amazing gift of seed, the dangers of selling tampered seed without years of careful research, and the disaster waiting for all of us if Monsanto and its agribusiness colleagues are allowed to continue putting profit before human health and sustainable farm practices.

The tipping point in all this will be an informed American public speaking out, not only on behalf of our own safe food supply, but on behalf of small farmers here and around the world.

Want some action points?

Express support for the organic farmers in their hearing this week against Monsanto:   Add your voice

Ask the FDA to require GMOs to be labeled:  Just Label It

Download a non-GMO shopping guide as an ebook, iPhone app, or pdf file, and vote with your dollars for GMO-free food.  Shopping guide.

As always, your thoughts, suggestions and comments are welcome.